Friday, July 13, 2007

Here's the first draft reading list for my fall grad class. It's been an interesting challenge to divide these thematically and to cover different aspects of C&W, and in fact the optional reading list -- all books -- is almost as long as the required list.

Comments? Suggestions?

Reading List for E388m

Overview: History

Gerrard, L. (1995). The evolution of the Computers and Writing Conference. Computers and Composition, 12:279–292.

Gerrard, L. (2006). The evolution of the Computers and Writing Conference, the second decade. Computers and Composition, 23:211–227.

Moran, C. (2003). Computers and composition 1983-2002: What we have hoped for. Computers and Composition, 20:343–358.

[Faigley, 1992] Faigley, L. (1992). Fragments of rationality: Postmodernity and the subject of composition. Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and culture. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh. (Ch.6)

Hawisher, G. E. and Selfe, C. L. (1991). The rhetoric of technology and the electronic writing class. College Composition and Communication, 42:55–65.

[Mirel, 1996] Mirel, B. (1996). Writing and database technology: Extending the definition of writing in the workplace. In Sullivan, P. and Dautermann, J., editors, Electronic literacies in the workplace: Technologies of writing, pages 91–112. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Ill.

Haas, C. (1999). On the relationship between old and new technologies. Computers and Composition, 16(2):209–228.

Syverson, M. (1999). The wealth of reality: An ecology of composition. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville.

Computers and writing at work I: Evaluating the impact of computers on workplace writing and thinking

Matteo, A. (2007, in press). Rhetorical peaks, a next generation case study for teaching writing and argument. In SIGDOC ’07: Proceedings of the 25th annual international conference on Design of communication.

Sherlock, L. (2007, in press). When social networking meets online games: The activity system of grouping in World of Warcraft. In SIGDOC ’07: Proceedings of the 25th annual international conference on Design of communication.

Zachry, M. (2000). The ecology of an online education site in professional communication. In Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation, pages 433–442. IEEE Educational Activities Department.

Zappen, J. P., Adali, S., and Harrison, T. M. (2006). Developing a youth-services information system for city and county government: experiments in user-designer collaboration. In dg.o ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government research, pages 259–264, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.

Computers and writing at work II: Computers, writing, and postindustrialism

If you view the Internet as a shiny new toy, or worse, a new coat of paint on the old jalopy, you're missing the point. Increasingly, it's becoming the platform from which campaign strategy itself is executed. That's why stuff like body language towards the mediumat the candidate level matters (Fred's blogging, Barack's dinners, Hillary's Sopranoing). Tactics without strategy will get you nowhere.

John Mackey, iconoclastic CEO of Whole Foods, posted freely on Yahoo Finance stock forums from 1999 to 2006 "under an alias ["Rahodeb"] to avoid having his comments associated with the Company and to avoid others placing too much emphasis on his remarks," according to a company statement. The WSJ continues:

Mr. Mackey declined to be interviewed. But he soon posted on the company Web site, saying that the FTC was quoting Rahodeb "to embarrass both me and Whole Foods." He also said: "I posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because I had fun doing it. Many people post on bulletin boards using pseudonyms." He said that "I never intended any of those postings to be identified with me."

TechCrunch notes that Y Combinator, the incubator that brought us Scribd, has unveiled wiki product Versionate. Michael Arrington thinks it's going to be a strong competitor to GDocs, particularly since you can upload Office documents (Word and Excel), OpenOffice docs, images, etc. Versionate's comparison chart doesn't include GDocs, but it does give you a good idea of what it can do -- including group-level permissions, something that is sorely lacking in GDocs.